What was the impact of your benefit sanction?

The Work and Pensions Committee has opened an inquiry into the use of benefit sanctions, and Action for M.E. wants to hear from you so we can tell them how the use of sanctions impact people with M.E.

Sanctions are where a claimant’s benefits are docked for a period of time because they have breached a condition of receiving those benefits, such as attending appointments with a work coach. If a person is sanctioned and their benefit payments are temporarily stopped, it can drastically affect their financial security.

If you have received a sanction while claiming benefits and want to tell us a little bit about your experience, please get in touch before Monday 14 May, including details of:

when you were sanctioned (just month and year is fine)

what region (eg. Midlands) or nation (eg. Wales) this happened in.

When sharing your experience, please consider the following questions:

What was the reason for your sanction?

Did you appeal against the sanction, and what was the outcome?

Did receiving a sanction have an impact on your health?

What other impact did receiving a sanction have? Could you still afford basic living costs, such as food, transport and housing?

Sanctions are applied by Work Coaches and other DWP advisors. How has your experience of being sanctioned impacted on your relationship with them?

Any amount of information you are able to give us is valuable, so please only share what is manageable for you. We will be sure to anonymise all submissions we refer to (usually we will quote directly from your story) when we respond to this inquiry.